Nandini Sarma, a senior high school student at the Shawnee Mission East High School, Kansas has recently received several awards and wide recognition for her outstanding research work in biomedical sciences. Since her freshman year in high school, Nandini has been conducting research to find solutions to common health related problems such as food-borne illnesses, cancer and viral infections.
Her research on natural food preservatives revealed that garlic (Allium sativum) can effectively replace the harmful synthetic chemical preservatives from the food chain (meat and eggs), thus providing a health friendly, easily available and cost effective natural alternative to prevent food-borne illnesses caused by consumption of Salmonella and E. coli contaminated meat and eggs.
For cancer research, Nandini studied the effect of a selected virus infection on Herpesvirus induced tumor development in-vivo and its affinity to kill transformed cells in-vitro. Although, from the preliminary studies she came out with interesting findings and encouraging results, further work is in progress before coming to a final conclusion.
Recently, Nandini started working on pathobiology of Herpes simplex virus under the mentorship of Prof. G. S. Read, one of the world’s most renowned scientists in Herpes simplex Virus research. Using RNAi, real time RT-PCR and other molecular biology techniques, she found that certain eukaryotic cellular translation initiation factors are required for the virus to initiate infection and cause mRNA degradation, eventually leading to cellular death. Her research findings were presented at the 32nd International Herpesvirus Workshop and a research paper is being prepared for publishing in the “Journal of Virology”.